Tag: painting

So we’re going to time jump here a little, I’ve done several other paintings with ArtRage in the last month or so and as I’ve been on my quest for a more painterly look I’ve been reading quite a bit about color choice etc. It seems that color is a much more in depth subject than I’d ever considered it to be with complimentary colors, primaries and so on, I remember some of this stuff from grade school but never gave it the respect or attention it deserved.

One of my tendencies is to use transparent washes of black to darken a given color in an image to achieve the shadow or blending I’m looking for. Little did I know that black has one characteristic that isn’t altogether desirable, that is, it mutes the vibrancy of most colors. So I decided I’d have to learn to do without black which means I need more hues of a particular color, fortunately thanks to the Scaps in ArtRage I’m able to mix my own colors in a pretty traditional media way even though I’ve never actually done it with physical paint. The color picker would also work for this I assume by adjusting the hue slider though I didn’t try it out. My goal was to take titanium white and one other color and paint a picture of an apple using just various hues of said color without using any black. I was only partially successful because I ended up using black for the stem of the apple because I couldn’t get it to look how I wanted without it. This whole painting was very educational as it taught me a lot about value, I intend to do several more like it of different subjects.

I also used more of a painterly approach to this one resisting the urge to use the pallette knife to smooth things out. I used the square canvas 2 custom brush that comes standard with ArtRage 5 and is simply a delight to work with. Kudos to its creator I bought his other brush packs based on the usefulness of that brush alone.

As I’ve been exploring my limited creative potential, I’ve discovered at this point I’m pretty much limited to still life with a single subject. I’ve also discovered that I need to stick with simple subjects, my sketching abilities aren’t too polished as I’ve really never put the time in to bring them up to par. It’s been quite educational so far and I’m thankful that digital media is fairly forgiving of mistakes, mine is a very trial and error approach.

I started with Artrage lite but almost immediately decided it was an excellent program and I might as well get the full version with custom brush support and the other extras, one should definitely support developers of such a program. As I said before I’ve barely scratched the surface of features and I’m primarily working with the oil brush and custom brushes, I use the pallette knife quite a bit at this point as well. Color blending can be a little hit and miss if you get two darker colors together and don’t know one has some yellow in it for instance, I’ve found that color sampling from a reference photo doesn’t really work for me. I haven’t really developed a painterly style yet so I tend to over use the pallette knife for smoothing and cleaning brush strokes. Hopefully at some point I’ll be able to paint with brush strokes and achieve the look I’m after until then all my work will resemble my second digital painting.

I’ve always been interested in art and drawing, I have dabbled with it over there years and found that I have no natural talent for it at all. Like most other things that I’m interested in it takes huge amounts of work for me to make any progress in them. Recently I decided after years of procrastination to purchase a Wacom tablet and try my hand at digital painting. I intend to document my progress here, fortunately for me I happened upon ArtRage which has been an absolute joy to use and begin to learn. I have barely scratched the surface of the potential it has and fear with my limited abilities will never do so. One very interesting feature of ArtRage is the custom brush engine allowing one to create some very unique brushes I’ve been experimenting with that and having a lot of fun. I will be uploading my creations here for anyone to use and hope they will be helpful to anyone who happens upon them. I’ll close this post with my first ever digital painting done in ArtRage.